trees and other natural nesting places,
woodies aren't above accepting man-made
nesting boxes. This led to the sort of hands
on conservation that people want to be a
part of-and countless sportsmen, bird lov
ers, and landowners began making nest box
es and placing them along woodland creeks,
pond edges, and marshes. Around some of
the city lakes in Minneapolis, wood duck
nesting boxes seem almost as common as
television antennas in a subdivision.
Today the wood duck, drawn back from
the brink, is one of our most numerous
ducks, with more than six million in the east
ern half of the United States. But we nearly
lost one of our national treasures.
HE MOST MAJESTIC of North
American wildfowl-the trumpeter
swan-had raised even greater con
cern. Until the 19th century trumpet
ers ranged through much of Canada and the
northern United States. Then, hunted com
mercially for their skins, the swans suffered
a swift decline. By 1912 ornithologist Ed
ward Howe Forbush was predicting their
extinction within "a matter of years."
As it turned out, the ornithologist was
wrong. The immense breeding range of the
great swans had shrunk from millions of
square miles to a few little corners of wilder
ness. By 1932 there were just 31 trumpeters
left in Yellowstone National Park, 26 more
in the Red Rock Lakes of Montana's Cen
tennial Valley, west of Yellowstone, and
about a dozen others elsewhere in the United
States. The trumpeter swan population then
known totaled just 69 birds.
In that dark hour the trumpeters were
given sanctuary with the creation of the Red
Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in
1935. Rescue was at hand. The trumpeters
began to increase, slowly at first, and during
the next 30 years the flock at Red Rock
Lakes increased to a peak of 423 birds.
Since then it has declined somewhat, adjust
ing to the available breeding habitat and
natural food supply. The Red Rocks popula
tion is now about a hundred adult swans,
with several hundred more in nearby Wyo
ming and Idaho.
These colonies and transplant popula
tions in other western states are doing well
and previously unknown breeding grounds
have been discovered in southern Alaska.
All in all, nearly 10,000 trumpeters are alive
today in North America. The great white
birds are no longer considered in danger.
NLIKE WOOD DUCKS and
trumpeter swans, wild geese were
never in peril of their existence, but
they suffered their share of travail and
were once far less numerous than they are to
day. My boyhood friend Jimmy shot the first
Canada goose I ever saw close up. It was a
far bigger creature than we had imagined,
colored like a prairie-storm sky and with the
look of a far traveler that had seen worlds be
yond the dreaming of Iowa boys. In that
long-ago autumn of 1937, it was a rarity. A
picture of Jimmy and his goose made the
front page of the local newspaper. Today
the item would be so commonplace that it
wouldn't rate two lines on the back page.
If someone had told us that we'd see the
time when it was no more unusual to shoot a
Canada goose than to bag a limit of cotton
tail rabbits, he'd have been pegged as a
dreamer. Yet when Jimmy shot that Canada
goose there were about 74,000 of them in our
Mississippi flyway. Today there may be
twice as many Canada geese in that flyway
alone as there were in all North America
when Jimmy and I were boys.
Dr. John P. Rogers, chief of the office of
migratory bird management, U. S. Fish and
Wildlife Service, told me, "Today there may
be as many as seven million geese of all kinds
in the fall flight. There are probably more
geese now than there have ever been."
Even back in the 1930s, the dawn of mod
ern wildlife management, it was believed
that lack of nesting habitat wasn't the main
problem of wild geese. Most geese tend to
nest north of the marsh drainage and inten
sive land use that plague their cousins, the
ducks. More serious problems for geese were
the lack of secure way-stops and good win
tering grounds along the flyways. These
were problems with ready solutions. With
new funding in the late 1930s, state and fed
eral refuge systems were greatly expanded.
In one of conservation's most heartening
success stories, wild geese flourished again,
proving to be more resilient and responsive
to management than anyone had dreamed.
Ducks and geese still run a gantlet of
North American Waterfowl
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